Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  Loralee held out her bleeding arm. “Yes, I do. It’s an anesthetic. Spray, please. Now. This hurts. Bandages would be nice, too. Butterfly bandages to hold it together.” She bit her lip and hissed her breath in and out as she felt the full force of the damage to her torn, bleeding skin. She was starting to go into shock and fought it off as she talked.

  Roger spun and retraced his path to fetch the rest of the first-aid kit as Pen applied equal parts profanity and anesthetic.

  Once Roger bandaged Loralee’s arm, they headed back to the command center.

  Roger said, “I didn’t hear any impacts of debris on the hull. That’s a good sign.” He got some painkillers out of the kit and handed them to Loralee.

  Pen pulled up to the spider’s console and rolled back the recording to replay it from the time of the launch. At about the time they expected the detonation, they saw a bright light flare through a pod window for several seconds. The pod remained intact. The escape pod thruster continued to fire as it faded into the distance. “So, it was a dud? No bomb? Did we do all that work and eject an escape pod for nothing?”

  Loralee added a question of her own. “Could we have missed the real detonator?”

  “Nah, we got ’er.” Roger scratched his chin. “You don’t need to go boom to put a hole through a hull. We should still check the station to make sure there weren’t no secondaries.”

  They scrambled to do an exhaustive search but found no more detonators or gas pockets.

  The next order of business was to get rid of all the switch triggers. The tension peaked when the switch on the remaining escape pod clicked as they removed it, but nothing happened. Their fear reduced to mere urgency as they spent the next few hours removing triggers and cleaning adhesive foam from the hatch of the remaining escape pod in preparation for the arrival of an emergency response shuttle.

  Roger fetched a new section of cable for the dish repairs and suited up to pull the triggers from the docking ring and the airlock hatch, but a full mission to patch the wiring was out of the question. Roger and Pen had been awake straight through most their sleep shift, so they were all ready to drop. Loralee volunteered to take a watch and sent them off to catch a little rest. She should have gotten some rest herself, but the combination of anesthetic and other painkillers had acted as a stimulant.

  Part way through her solitary shift she heard a docking sequence. Someone had arrived ahead of schedule.

  Pen and Roger both floated to a stop at the airlock rubbing their bleary eyes. Loralee pulled up with her left arm out in front of her to protect her right which was strapped down in a snug sling.

  A solar sail tug sat linked to the docking ring. Tugs gathered dangerous bits of debris and dead satellites, shuttled equipment between stations, and refueled live satellites to extend their life expectancy. The pilot stepped out of the airlock in a full pressure suit. Since the crew didn’t have suits on, he pulled his helmet off. Loralee recognized Zachary Brown, a pilot they knew from previous refueling and salvage runs. “Cloud One diverted me when you went dark. Would anyone care to tell me what’s going on here? Where’s the station manager?”

  From down the hall toward the crew quarters came the irregular sound of metal banging on metal, accompanied by muffled screams of rage.

  Zachary stayed on with them after the emergency response shuttle arrived. It took three people to pin and sedate Phil so they could transport him back to Cloud One, then to Earth at the next drop. Loralee gave the shuttle crew a supply of fresh vegetables and fruits as they left. The secret of her personal experiments was out now, so she might as well make the most of it with goodwill offerings accompanied by her full disclosure reports. It was up to the Consortium managers to decide how to proceed, but Loralee felt she’d made a good case with her research and results.

  After the shuttle left, the crew gathered with Zachary in the tiny mess hall. Loralee asked, “So now what? We’ve been so busy with reports and repairs that we haven’t had time to see if we’re all fired.”

  Zachary said, “I got some news on that. Ground crews recovered the escape pod. They say it had a rather large thermite charge inside, which is why it didn’t explode. The multiple layers of reentry heat shielding kept the thermite from melting through the hull, but they couldn’t identify any parts from the seat you used as a mounting point. The base of the seat was all that was left, with aluminum slag splattered everywhere. Good thing the pods are tough.”

  Zachary sucked on a water bottle as if he had nothing more to report.

  Pen prodded him with a toe. “And? Continued employment? Charges of destruction and endangerment? Hero parades? Somewhere in between? Where do we stand?”

  Zachary answered, “This had the potential to be the worst disaster in orbital history. You prevented that. I sent a preliminary report describing how you stopped it, and an audit of your assigned experiment results. I also added a summary of the results you’ve seen on your undocumented experiments. Between my advance warning and Loralee’s more formal report, it seems the Cloud Consortium has changed its policy on project approval since you’re several years ahead of some board member’s high-level unpublished goals. Your continued employment is guaranteed if you continue to make complete reports on everything and can produce a viable plan for self-sustaining ecosystems like you have promised. It’s not all roses by any means. They might not be so impressed with the moonshine and a few misappropriations, but I’ll see what I can do to gloss over those. I think we can make this work.”

  Roger chimed in. “Well, that’ll do. I guess this means you took the job as the new boss-man here on Cloud Nine then, did you?”

  Zachary nodded. “I’ve got your back, but don’t mess this up. Everyone will watch you now. You’ll live in a fishbowl.” He grinned as he reached into a bag Loralee held open for him. “Besides, those nutrition patties only go so far. Where else can I get fresh produce in orbit without waiting years?” He tossed a radish into his mouth and crunched down on it for emphasis.

  Loralee smiled. Plans didn’t always work out the way you expected, but she still had her lab. Her botany experiments could move forward as she had hoped, reducing their reliance on deliveries from the ground. She wondered what the Cloud Consortium board would think of building solar smelters next. Maybe Roger could use a new metallurgy project.

  Fido

  James Wymore

  I still have some control of my mind. If anybody else knew me, they might think I didn’t. But I do. It’s just been broken down into pieces, analyzed, and put back together so many times now. The connections might be a little bit off. I know a few tricks. It’s part of the game. I have to hide things from myself if I want to hide it from them. Why would I want to hide it from them? Because it’s my mind, and it’s the only thing I have left of my own. Let me try to put enough parts together to explain.

  Standing in the desert when they came down, I could feel the hot wind on my face. I couldn’t see anything. Nothing registered on radar or seismograph, but for a few seconds, even in the middle of a desert, my cell phone had four bars.

  Once they were below the mountains, their ship became visible. Unlike the expected saucer shape, it had building sized cubes sticking up at odd angles. Despite being larger than several city blocks, it was undetectable except for the hot wind. It landed without making a sound.

  A door opened on the side of the closest angular protrusion. It looked for all the world like a car salesman coming out of an office to see if I liked anything on the lot. There was no bright light or strange music. If I hadn’t watched it appear before my eyes, I would have thought some guy was coming out to ask me if I’d seen his lost cat.

  He sported a big smile and a tie the same color as his shirt. It was after dark. But I left my flash light off because it seemed like the polite thing to do. He waved and said, “Do you want to come with us and see the stars?”

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “Because you know about us.” That wasn’t true. I had seen
a blip, which I suspected was something important. I secretly hoped, against all the odds grilled into me by seven years of college, we’d someday make contact with extraterrestrials. I guess it was enough for them. “And because we think you want it. It’s your choice. We will take somebody. It can be somebody else if you don’t want to go.”

  “Will you ever bring me back?”

  “We won’t return in your lifetime.” His mouth moved, but only as an afterthought. It seemed a little bit out of sync with his words.

  I took a quick mental inventory of what I’d be leaving behind. A few college buddies, some Facebook friends, a boring job in Astronomy, and a girlfriend who wasn’t sure if she loved me. None if it compared to what I expected I would learn and see on that ship. Still, I was hesitant to just up and jump aboard.

  “How do I know I can trust you? Where will I stay? What will I do?”

  “We have an exact duplicate of your apartment and all the food or supplies you will need. You will not be required to do anything you don’t want to.”

  “Can I go back and tell my friends? Can I get some things to take with me?”

  “I’m sorry. We can’t stay long.” When he said long, his mouth didn’t close for three seconds after the sound was already over.

  “I want to go with you,” I said. I knew if I didn’t go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  He smiled and began walking back to the door that looked like it opened into the most normal strip mall in the world. I followed him.

  What an idiot! It was all a lie. They didn’t look like salesmen, this ship didn’t look like a bunch of buildings, and it wasn’t a store front I walked through. You see what they want you to see and hear what they want you to hear.

  One thing I learned for sure. Friends from college, some Internet pen pals, a boring job, and a timid girlfriend were definitely worth staying for.

  Still it wasn’t all bad. They more or less gave me the run of the place. Three squares and a half-decent house with no job; it was all most people ever asked for. I didn’t ask for it. At least, I don’t think I did. My memory is a little sketchy in places. At least I remember how I got here.

  My apartment, an exact copy of the one I lived in on Earth, isn’t bad. The big TV, a computer, clothes, and food are just like what I left. Framed art decorates the living room, and movie posters line the bedroom. The only real difference is here the fridge never gets empty. I’m not sure when they fill it. Probably when I’m asleep. Sometimes my worn clothes show up new, too.

  I think they downloaded the whole internet the day I got on this ship. I have thousands of movies and books, all from that year or before. It’s enough to keep me busy for a lifetime. But there is something stale about knowing there will never be any new books or movies. I can look up endless websites, but nobody updates them. Naturally, I refuse to start reading any series not published through completion already.

  The TV works. I have two hundred channels and no season premieres.

  The weirdest thing is that if I send an e-mail, somebody answers it. I know it isn’t the right person. Somebody on this ship takes a wild guess at what I want to hear and writes back. Creepy, right?

  I’m not completely alone. I have a girlfriend here. Well, sort of. She lives in the apartment across the hall.

  She goes somewhere she calls work every day. I meet her at the mailbox in the hall. I get junk mail and bills, but I never pay them. Nobody has yet come to evict me or turn off the utilities. She talks about her job, and how hard it is to deal with an unreasonable boss. She usually invites me over to her place for dinner. I don’t have any other plans, so I usually go. Sometimes I invite her over. It’s nice, really.

  The thing is, her words don’t match the movement of her mouth. That’s the tell. The aliens obviously communicate telepathically. So the business of aligning mouths with words is a bit off for them. If not for that, I would have thought I hit the jackpot being the only human male on a ship with a gorgeous woman. Like I said, I can’t trust my eyes or my ears.

  For a while, I tried not even using my brain. I figured out they can read my thoughts to some extent. I’m not sure how much. So I tried not to have any thoughts for a while. I looked up Buddhist meditation and attempted to keep my mind clear. Eventually, I completely gave up. What was the point? I’m like a goldfish in a glass bowl. So I let them have free run of my brain for a while. I regret it now. I should have kept something back, even then. Live and learn.

  I assumed they brought me here to observe human behavior. That’s probably why they set up the hot blond next door. As far as I can tell, the other doors in the apartment’s hall are empty. Maybe if I played nice with whatever it was they were projecting in my mind to be the hot neighbor, they would have installed some friends and an eccentric landlady. But I don’t want that. It’s hard enough holding onto the few threads of sanity I have left, without going all the way into their imaginary world.

  Still, she’s a better cook than I am. And we have some deep conversations.

  Astronomy used to be my life. Little dots in the sky. I would squeeze them for every tiny bit of information possible until I’d wrung all I could from the light they sent across the great abyss of space.

  I found a planet orbiting a nearby star. I documented it, named it, and walked away with a Ph.D. I was a hot scientist for twenty-seven. The world was my oyster. Then the government hired me to join a team working with the Hubble Space Telescope. It was a dream until a few years later when I started to realize how boring it was to catalogue space dust in various configurations. Sure, I was mapping the universe for blue and red shifts, looking for the location of the big bang. Still, it just became tedious.

  I was about ready to look for a new job when I found the blip. Less than that, it was just a blurring on the edge of a star. I showed it to dozens of people. Most of them discounted it as an aberration. But I couldn’t let it go. So I made a dozen wild hypotheses and began looking for the same thing. Weeks later, I saw it in front of another star. It looked like heat was warping the light at the star’s edge.

  I wrote it up in a paper. Nobody believed it. I didn’t bother to tell them when I saw it streak across the full moon. I did the math, projected the trajectory, and went to the desert by myself. By then I was sick of trying to make them believe me.

  I don’t know what I expected to find there. A weird meteorite, maybe?

  Thinking they were studying me was naïve. They weren’t. They are so far above us that there’s nothing for them to learn from studying us. A dog has more intelligence compared to us than we have to them. And that is all I was to them. I was an exotic pet they mused over in moments of boredom. That’s why, when I met my neighbor for the first time and she asked my name, I didn’t tell her my real name. I told her to call me Fido. And she did.

  In some circles, I was kind of a big deal. Incidentally, the planet I found early in my career orbits the star known as “the dog’s ear” in Canis Major. So I named it Fido. Pretty funny, right?

  Anyway, the joke was on me. I didn’t appreciate what I had when I had it. And I could never go back. There were windows on this ship. So I knew the starscape was slowly changing. Only a little, of course. Most of it still looks the same.

  Not here in my apartment, though. My windows are 3D movie projectors. You can make shadow puppets on the street with your hand. Even so, it really looks the same as the city outside my apartment used to. The video loop restarts every week or so. When it was real, I never bothered looking out my window at those people. After a year on this ship, I memorized every single face and action.

  I decided to go for a walk one day. I’d seen everything in the hall outside my apartment. But I needed to get out and move around before I screamed. Most of the time I’m okay, but sometimes it gets to me. You know?

  I left the door open. It wasn’t like anybody was going to walk in and steal something. Predictably, the blond was just leaving for “work.” I have clocks. So I know she doesn’t
keep anything like regular hours. She usually leaves for or returns from work whenever I happen to be in the hall. What are the odds?

  “Hello, Fido. How was your morning?” Her voice expressed genuine interest. She made eye contact with dazzling blues that seemed lit from behind.

  “Same as every day, Monster.” She had a made up name back when. But I just called her Monster to keep it real. She played along and now it’s stuck. “I’m alone on an alien spaceship and I have never even seen one of the aliens.”

  “I’m here. You can see me now.”

  “Yep.” Usually I’m cool with it. I made the choice to come here. And as far as I know, I’m the only human ever to live on an alien space ship. That’s pretty awesome, right? But once in a while I get down on it. I really shouldn’t have taken it out on her, though.

  “Why are you so sad?” she asked. Her lips twisted into a short sneer during the “you.” It was like a nervous twitch except it didn’t alter the sound that came out at all.

  “Because you’re not human.”

  “I’m almost human.”

  “And that’s not what you really look like.”

  “Why does it matter what I look like?” This time when she said “matter” it actually looked like “vacuum.”

  “Because it’s a lie. If you won’t show me what you really look like, I can’t trust you.”

  “I can look like whatever you want.” This wasn’t a new conversation. And it didn’t sound sexy like a movie with a shape shifter dazzling all the male imaginations.

  I said, “I want you to look like what you are when I’m not looking at you.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because perception is in the mind. It’s a negotiation. You don’t have sensors capable of perceiving my natural form.” Her mouth completely stopped moving after “mind.” She always said something like that.